Tuesday, December 31, 2013

Come one, come all, to the biggest review of the year – my two-parter
Storm of the Century one, that is! The first part taught us many enlightening
facts. It taught us that singing I’m a Little Teapot is on par with The Exorcist
in terms of scaring people, that the proper response to talking about abortion
is to bash the other person over the head, and that crossword puzzles are Satan
incarnate. What will happen this time? The suspense is just killing me.

Well, let’s not waste any time then!

We start off this side of the DVD with Andre Linoge killing some old
lady by making her drown herself in the sink – well, give him points for
originality. I don’t even know how that’s
necessarily Linoge’s doing. Maybe she just dropped her dentures down there.

After that, we get some more fun times with – guess what:

a) The teapot song

b) Crossword puzzles

If you guessed “A,” you’re right! Your prize is more scenes of “Give me
what I want and I will go away” written in blood, this time on the mirror in
the bathroom:

Not getting old AT ALL yet, is it? Several times during this whole
thing, we get Linoge repeating the line “Hell is repetition,” in regards to
people eating other peoples’ eyes in hell, or something like that. Either way
it’s a bit odd – is King just admitting that hell is watching this movie? I
mean, so much of it is just repeating the same tropes and “scares” over and
over again … maybe the movie became self-aware during post-production. That sounds like something King would write about actually!

Anyway, yeah, so Katrina Withers, who murdered her boyfriend in the
previous segment, is hanging out watching the moms play with the kids, when
they all start singing the Teapot song again. She starts crying, remembering
her trauma when Linoge made her murder the boyfriend. All the kids are
surprised by this, and then ask what’s wrong with Katrina Withers…and okay,
I’ve got to stop the review for a second and address a bit of a pet peeve of
mine with this whole thing: Stephen King’s overuse of characters saying each
other’s full names when talking to one another in normal conversation.

"You will refer to me by my birth name, which is Michael Arnold Jonathan Caligula Jacob Cheese Sandwich Smith. If you try to shorten that in any way, I will destroy you."

Yes, it’s a bit of a nitpick, but this trope is so common in King’s
writing for any medium that I just have to mention it. It’s just so contrived –
nobody talks like that! Does every character have to say everyone else’s first
AND last name when addressing them? It’s kinda quaint in a small-town Maine
sort of way, but the way it’s done here is just over-done. Maybe King just
realized he’d put in too many goddamn characters and this was the only way to
keep them all straight in his own head … eh, well, any way that works I guess!

So back to the review then. It turns out Linoge is getting his kicks
now by taunting Robbie about his mother, who died while Robbie was with a
hooker somewhere – what a dirtbag. So the old grandma makes some scary faces
and then shouts so loud that she actually creates a gust of wind that blows
Robbie across the room. Then Linoge breaks out of prison as this happens:

Oh my God, the color blue is breaking out of the I Know Who Killed Me vault and threatening to usurp the world! AAAAAGGGGHHHHH!!!!!

And what is he supposed to be here? Geriatric Gandalf? Dumbledore on a
sick day?

Is that really the scariest thing they could come up with to represent Legion? An old codger in a robe? Why not go full stop and give him Alzheimer's in this state too, really add to the effect?

Well, whatever – he leaves. I guess there’s no incentive to go find
him. I don’t think being a small-town cop had a section in the rulebook for
what to do when your prisoner magically breaks out of jail and turns into a
reject from a Terry Goodkind book. Might have to add that one in next year,
guys!

Then they all go outside and have a good time watching a lighthouse
fall down:

Will somebody turn the 'blue' filter off?!

While I’m sure King intended this to be really atmospheric and affecting,
it kind of gets lost in the film and doesn’t come up that much before or after
this scene … in fact I’m pretty sure they don’t even talk about it at the end
after the storm has passed and all. The effects are, well, about what you’d
expect from a 1990s TV special – I’d make fun of them, but it’d be kinda like
making fun of a low-budget art student’s pet project for senior class after
visiting the Louvre.

...

Oh, okay, just one joke: Not the director's toy lighthouse! That was a childhood relic!

And get this – guess how Mike discovers the real identity of Linoge? He
plays around with some kids’ toy blocks until he comes up with…

Why don't you discover a new musical symphony via the Xylophone next? Or maybe find the cure for cancer in a pop-up picture book? The possibilities are limitless.

Yup, Legion. That’s who Andre Linoge really was this whole time – one
of the most well-known demons from the Bible. While the movie thankfully never
delves too deep into the whole Biblical thing, it is definitely there. Whatever floats your boat. All
I’m saying is, how come he didn’t discover Linoge’s real identity through a
crossword puzzle? Wouldn’t that have been more in keeping with the movie’s
erudite themes?

We then see everyone fall asleep and have different dreams about the
whole island being found empty and deserted once the storm clears in the future.
That’s all fine and well, but there is one really silly moment: when the
newscaster breaks character in this kid Davey Hopewell’s dream and looks
straight into the camera and says “Davey, you’re too damn short to play
basketball.”

Uh, seriously? Let me just put that into perspective for you: this is a
dream in which everyone on the whole island is mysteriously disappeared. Why would being too short to play
basketball factor into the equation? Moral of the story: teenagers have
weird-ass dreams.

There’s also another dream in which everyone on the island is walking
over a cliff and into the sea:

This part is actually kind of effective. Why did they even bother with
the other scene with the too-short-to-play basketball stuff? Just stick with
this, King! There’s some real effective tie-ins to the Roanoke Island mystery,
as it seems like the same thing is happening again on the movie’s island. This
is what King is really great at – tying his supernatural stories into real life
mysteries and events. Occasionally it comes off as hokey, but a lot of the time
it adds an extra dimension that really puts the viewer/reader in the story.
It’s very atmospheric.

After that, we get one of the woman who was thought lost in the storm
suddenly recovered. She tells them a story about how Linoge found her and then
made her come back and tell everyone that if they give Linoge what he wants,
he’ll go away. Shocking how new this
info is, right? Then she actually does
give us something new by telling everyone that Linoge wants to meet them that
night. What a shock! Information that actually moves the plot forward!

But then everything is thrown back into confusion and insanity as all
the kids mysteriously faint and won’t wake up. The parents are all afraid that
the kids found their secret Valium stashes hidden beneath the bathroom sink,
but it’s okay. Linoge shows them through the window that he has them all flying
in the air with him, holding hands like a game you’d play at recess.

Just imagine it was Michael Jackson instead of Linoge there – now THAT
would be scary!

Oh okay, that was kind of a low blow – but the film does have an actual child molester in
it. Apparently it’s the town priest, if you can believe that … yes, King
actually put in that tired cliché. Linoge reveals that secret to Mike after
Mike talks to the priest about the religious implications of what’s going on.
Literally – Linoge flat out tells them
that the priest sexually assaults his two young nieces on a regular basis.

Uh, pardon me for asking, guys; sorry if this is insensitive, but WHAT
THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING STILL CHASING THIS LINOGE GUY?! Take the child molesting
fuck ass out back and make sure he never does it again! Lock him up in the jail cell! You can deal
with the literal demon from Hell later; just make sure this sick fuck gets
what’s coming to him!

But of course they don’t and it never comes up again. Instead we get a
scene where Linoge threatens to make a woman burn her own face off if they
don’t listen to what he has to say. I’ll sum it up – he demands that they all
meet him in the City Hall that night. So they set about doing exactly that.
They gather in city hall and Linoge shows up. Before he actually tells them
what he wants though, he spends some more time going around to random town
people and humiliating them. How awesome. Maybe he’ll post a series of YouTube
videos doing this next.

"Subscribe to my channel. You can also see my 87 impersonations in 100 seconds video too!"

But no, he actually FINALLY tells us what it is he wants. Brace
yourselves. Sit close to the screen. Do not under ANY CIRCUMSTANCES miss what
he says next … after all, you wouldn't want all of this time you spent watching the movie wasted now, would you? So what’s it gonna be? Does he want a lifetime subscription to
their town newsletter without the annoying emails about each month’s next
meeting? Does he want to know how many licks it takes to get to the tootsie
roll center of a tootsie roll pop? What the hell is it?

Well, listen to this: his request is one of their children. He wants to
take away one of their children to become his heir after he dies in thousands
of years. And if they don’t give him
one, he will kill everyone on the island, children included. Jesus. Why not just hit up an adoption agency? Wouldn't that make more sense? I guess he just likes being super fuckin' dramatic and wasting a bunch of time. Hell, why not take a kid who doesn't have parents off the streets and raise him? Just goes to show you how bad orphans have it, doesn't it? Not even a demonic dying entity from Hell wants them.

He then gives the
whole island thirty minutes to decide what to do. They all immediately set
about establishing that they don’t have any problem giving Linoge a child if he’ll
spare the rest of them. Except, that is, for Mike, who stands up and calls them
all insane. His position is simple – if they give Linoge a child, how will they
live with themselves from then on? Nobody really has an answer to this, except
that they don’t want to die. And frankly, it IS a tough situation, and there
ARE no really great answers to anything going on here. Mike gives his point and
the others have their own, all rather unfounded and flawed except for the simple fact that they don’t know what to do – because it is such a
hard choice. Eventually they do have to settle on giving him a child though,
simply for self-preservation.

Linoge comes and makes them all take a little rock – seven of
them white and one black, and the parent with the black one is the child who
Linoge will take. And if the laws of dramatic irony have ever had any presence,
guess whose kid gets chosen?

That’s right. Mike, the only person in the room who didn’t like the
idea, is the one who gets the short end of the stick here. Linoge turns back
into geriatric Gandalf and carries young Ralphie Anderson off into the
background of the ET poster.

Then we get an “epilogue” where Mike has decided to move off the
island. He divorces his wife and takes his car and just drives. He eventually
ends up, for some reason, becoming an FBI agent or something – isn’t that kinda
random? And then he sees his grown-up son with vampire teeth – which are only
shown in close-up because the movie didn’t have the kid’s parents’ permission
for him to wear them himself:

I'm just amazed Andre Linoge would take the kid anywhere in the proximity of Mike. You'd think he would know better than that.

All in all I just have one question at the end of this: what the hell
did they ever do about that pedophilic priest? Did they arrest him? Did they
save the little girls? Come on! You can’t just tell me they let him live! Does
a storm of the century with a horrific demonic entity taking children really
excuse PEDOPHILIA?!

Eh, I guess it does. Innocence is dead.

So that’s Storm of the Century. All bullshit aside, I like it. It’s a
good, imaginative movie with some real heart and soul to it. Unlike flops like IT
or Pet Sematary, this actually takes itself seriously for the most part and
delivers a good story that rises up through the rather average acting and
production values. The characters, while too numerous, are occasionally very
good, and the atmosphere and tension are fairly palpable.

While there’s nothing exactly arresting going on here, and the whole is
perhaps too long, I kinda like the
huge running time. It makes this whole thing more spacious and detailed, really
giving the viewer a feel for the atmosphere it’s trying to convey, and the
weight of it all is so massive that it’s really something you have to see to
believe. Even for all its flaws and silly moments, Storm of the Century is
impressive.

And that’s 2013 for Cinema Freaks. It’s been a fun year with some great
reviews, some terrible movies and even some really good, fun movies in the mix.
Check back any time for more.

Monday, December 23, 2013

So, winter has finally come, there’s snow outside and the air is
ass-numbingly cold. Your plans to go outside and frolic may have been quelched
by the oncoming tide of snow flurries and ice-cold winds. It might be time to
dig into the attic and bring out the mittens, scarves, wool blankets and
kindling for the fireplace. And while you’re doing that, why not put on one of
the best wintertime movies, Storm of the Century?

Yes, the Stephen King TV classic of murder, madness and I’m a Little
Teapot itself. This is a huge, huge
movie, with a lot to cover, so I’ll be splitting up the review into two parts.
Isn’t that exciting? Aren’t you just unable to contain yourself?

Yes, my fans are all Asian now.

Well, shut up. This is Storm of the Century!

We start off this masterpiece with some narration, informing us that
the great “storm of the century” did not
teach the narrator the value of life, but that he only just learned it a little
while ago. Well gee, isn’t that a
strange way to start off a movie?

Now with real snow and ice! Take the Universal Studios ride!

It’s like “Yeah, I didn’t learn anything from the story of the movie
you’re about to see. But when I woke up drunk and high off my ass in a motel
with a fat hooker the other day before coming in to record the final narration,
THEN I came to the realization that my life was a catastrophic ruin and I
should have managed my money better!”

I mean geez, imagine if some other films started off in a similar
manner. Imagine if Se7en started like that.

“I didn’t really learn anything from the events in the film you’re
about to unfold. But now, years later and after many therapy sessions, I think
I finally understand the point: you should never, under any circumstances,
trust Kevin Spacey.”

Yeah, not quite as powerful, is it?

So what am I talking about? Well, when you’re in the movie that thinks
it’s a good idea to juxtapose the brutal murder of an old lady while her
attacker sits down to watch the weather channel and sing “I’m a Little Teapot”…

Note: No teapots were harmed in the making of Storm of the Century.

…and the brutal head-stuck-in-the-stairs scene of a young girl in town
as her classmates mock her ruthlessly, setting her up for years and years of
psychotherapeutic sessions with an overpaid, over-medicated shrink:

She went on to star in the 8-bit version of Let the Right One In.

Yeah, not quite seamless, is it? Bit of an odd pair of scenes to play
after one another. I love the head-in-stairs scene just because it’s so
bizarre…they spend way too much time on this. It’s not a particularly telling
or atmospheric scene. Unless the point is that the little girl will now begin a
downward spiral of getting her head stuck places throughout her adolescence.
But mostly it’s just hilarious to picture Stephen King, the master of horror
himself, putting so much effort into this.

And the other scene is just baffling, too. “I’m a Little Teapot,”
really? That was the scariest thing you could come up with for the villain’s
motif? Apparently, yeah, this guy’s name is Andre Linoge. He kills the nicest
old lady in town for no reason and then sets up camp to watch TV. The weather
channel is hilarious, warning of the coming storm in the most fanatical way
possible. Check out the weather lady’s great
TV journalism:

“The forecast is calling for destruction tonight, death tomorrow, and
Armageddon by the weekend. This could be the end of all life as we know it.”

Yeah, THAT wouldn’t incite panic, right? Totally neutral and definitely how weather people are
supposed to act! I’m sure she’ll have a great career writing tabloid junk for
The National Enquirer by day and fanatical 2012 Mayan calendar bullshit by night.
I guess maybe it’s just part of Linoge’s magical sorcery after breaking the TV
though.

So a couple people come in and discover the horrific crime, and then
find themselves accosted by Linoge, who somehow knows their darkest secrets.
The town manager, Robbie Beals, comes in and finds out that Linoge knows all
about that time he was with a hooker while his mother was dying in a hospice
bed far away. It is actually a very creepy, effective scene, and the atmosphere
is through the roof.

And this continues as Mike Anderson, the town constable, and his men
arrest Linoge and take him down to the county jail, which for some reason is
located in the grocery store. As the back door is jammed shut and there is no
way into the jail directly, Mike and his guys are forced to take Linoge through
the grocery store where most of the town is shopping before the storm. As they
do, he reveals some things about other town citizens, like the young woman who
went onto the mainland and got an abortion recently, or the guy who sells
marijuana out of his warehouse illegally.

He also has the gall to touch Mike’s son, which turns the whole thing
into a circus once Mike finds out that Linoge doesn’t have a wallet. Obviously
keen on setting a good example for the cops and the rest of the townspeople,
Mike goes apeshit and shoves Linoge up against the wall like a crazy person.
Isn’t it a bit early to go nuts at this point, guy? I mean Christ, so many more
people are going to die over the next five hours of movie screentime! Save some inhuman rage for later!

"I'll show you that I can act dramatic and bland at the same time!"

This is all fine and good, but I just want to know what would happen if
he got one of these “prophecies” wrong for once. Wouldn’t that be hilarious?
Just imagine his face!

So I guess they lock him up and all, and he keeps on jabbering about
how if the townspeople “give him what he wants,” he’ll go away. As the storm is
coming in, they don’t really have time to focus on that, and half the town is
stuck in a shelter whilst the other half is watching over Linoge. But Mike does
find time to go back to the murdered old woman’s place and find Linoge’s slogan
written on the wall in blood:

Well, geez, there are easier ways to redecorate a house you don't like than killing its sole occupant and painting the walls in her blood...personally I like Craigslist.

The only frustrating thing about this whole thing is that Linoge won’t say what he wants. So this whole time
he’s killing everyone and causing Stephen King-ified trouble all around town
and asking them to “give him what he wants,” there’s no clues to what it is he
actually wants! It’s sort of like having a fickle girlfriend angry at you for
some reason she won’t tell you about. Well, actually that’s selling the movie
short – picture that same fickle girlfriend if she didn’t even speak the same
language as you. That’s what Storm of the Century’s villain’s evil plan is
like.

While that’s going on, we also get numerous scenes of Mike interacting
with Robbie Beals. Apparently Robbie likes to try and take things into his own
hands and investigate, even though Mike sees this as his own job. They have a
couple separate quarrels about this, spread out throughout the film, and really
I don’t see the point … unless Robbie
really has this history of messing up police investigations, in which case I am
not sure how he’d even have a high city position at all. But this is never
established, and the movie mostly just wastes time with these two, which could
have been cut out and made the movie that much shorter.

What is this, a remake of The Odd Couple?

And that’s another one of the problems with this. As much as I love a
good, long, epic film, and as entertaining as this is, there are way too many characters. It’s like two simultaneous games
of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon going on. You will never be able to keep track of
all these characters. I mean, even as much as King tries to fix that problem by
having them all constantly refer to one another by their full names. Nice
effort, but it’s still about as confusing as your last family reunion with your
super-distant cousins and their super distant cousins, and so on. I will give
it that it tries to genuinely replicate the feeling of a small town though.

While the townspeople are clamoring about, Linoge is busy doing incredibly
important things while locked up in jail, like helping the police with
crossword puzzles:

This truly is the only way Andre Linoge could get his point across. He just got lucky and found the only town in America with a crossword puzzle superstition.

Yup, that’s the extent of his evil so far. Singing “I’m a Little
Teapot” over and over and helping the police with crossword puzzles. Why do I
get the idea this guy would be laughed out of the annual villains’ convention?
But I guess he does eventually kill that guy by making him hang himself though.

"You've helped with your last crossword puzzle, buddy..."

Oops, wait, no, I had another one.

Good start, but how about something a little more adventurous? Like …
an ax to the face, maybe?

Now introducing Axe-O-Vision.

Yeah, that’s more like it! I give that kill scene three out of four
stars. But you could still do better, though … like, maybe have the couple with
the aborted baby argue outside in the snow. That’s a good way to set up a kill
scene. Or at least, make the viewers want
to kill someone.

Back the fucking camera up. We don't need to see what it's like to French kiss this jackass.

So, I gotta admit, this scene actually isn’t that bad. For a scene
where two young people are arguing about abortion, Stephen King handles it
surprisingly really well in a medium where his stories usually turn to crap.
The girl, Kat, apparently had the abortion because she couldn’t count on the
guy to help out, seeing as he was cheating on her at the time. Neither side is
really right and neither side is completely wrong either. It’s a pretty damn
good, heavy drama scene.

After that, Linoge tries to make the guy kill Kat, but he can’t do it.
So then Linoge does the ole switcheroo and makes Kat kill the guy instead,
which she does. She then sits on the ground and intones creepily about the
murder in a dead-sounding voice. Which is also done very well, and creates a
lot of atmosphere:

…until she eventually just comes out and says she killed him, which kinda ruins the moment. It worked better
at first because she was being so vague about it, but when she just comes out
and says it, the spell is broken.

Ah well. At least we have a scene after that in which Linoge talks
about how this other guy and his friends once beat up a gay guy. In
retaliation, as Mike is standing in between them, the guy shoots at Linoge and
instead hits Mike. How awesome. This guy should be the official marksman of the
town. Why haven’t they handed him a gun award yet?

So that’s pretty much the end of Side One of my DVD – they get ready
for the storm and then that’s it; cliffhanger. Tune in next time for the
exciting conclusion, when we learn that really, all Andre Linoge wanted was a
lifetime supply of Lean Cuisine ravioli.

Am I bullshitting you with that? Well, you’ll have to wait until next
week to see!

Tuesday, December 17, 2013

Sequels are a tricky business. For example, what can you say
to a film which, by all accounts many people outright loathed, which then
produces a sequel only amplifying the qualities which everyone hated about the
original? I liked Kick-Ass. It was an unsubtle, goofy movie, but it
had real drama to it at times, some really funny moments and I enjoyed the characters. It kept things down to Earth
enough that the violence was fun and the film had a lot of swagger and style –
it was just an enjoyable trip. However, I could never really defend it from the
people who called it a pandering, depraved violent piece of hack-work. It kind
of was.

However, the sequel sucks shit through a straw and everyone
involved should be ashamed.

I mean this shit is just rock bottom. From a writing
standpoint, it’s abysmal; I mean really, really goddamn bad. This is the kind
of thing that a middle schooler on a sugar high would think is acceptable, the kind of thing that makes the writers of good movies pour another glass of Scotch. The kind of thing that proves that really, entertainment in America has cancer. And I hate to say it, but it looks to be a terminal case.

Sigh, so I guess I should actually talk about this movie. To sum it up: lines so lame the actors literally look
embarrassed to deliver them, if not outright bored as hell, too many random
plot lines shoved in with little to no coherence, death scenes that try to go
for drama but then shoot themselves in the foot with goofy shit, and some truly
ridiculous moments that should probably have their own Ripley’s Believe It Or
Not entries.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg! Horrified yet?

We start off with some rushed scenes with shitty narration
over top explaining that main character Dave has gotten bored since he stopped
being Kick-Ass at the end of the last film. You know, the motivation of all
great film characters! Right up there with ‘wanting to get a snack but being
too lazy to get up’! There’s no gun being held to your head and forcing you to write this script, guys ...

Oh ... well, shut up.

Point is, next time if you don’t find yourself giving a shit about anything, don’t bother making a movie at all. I mean, the whole reason Dave even talks to Mindy again
amounts to "he feels like it." It’s such a bland,
vague reason to have a movie that it mostly just seems like they could
have set it at any time. What’s the reason anything in this movie has to happen
when it does? It could be the next day after the events of the first movie, two
years like the movie says, or ten years, and either way nothing would change.

There’s no gravity to this story. The main character’s
motivation is boredom, for Christ’s
sake! At least in the first one, he genuinely thought he could make a
difference. This time it’s just like “eh, I got nothing better to do; already
jerked off, checked up on the Duck Dynasty forums and prepared a speech for my
acceptance into the Douchebag Hall of Fame, might as well become a superhero
again.”

The first lines of dialogue these guys utter in this movie are about fantasizing about Aunt May from the Spider-Man universe. Kinda sets the tone.

On the other side of the spectrum we get Chris D’Amico/Red
Mist, who learns that Kick Ass is back and is so furious that he complains to
his mother like a little kid who wants to go back to the toy store. The
mother’s acting is about as horrible as can be. She has a ridiculous
fake-sounding Boston accent that comes off as like the director never heard a real Boston accent in his life. I mean it makes these look like credible, native-born Bostonian citizens!

As it turns out, Red Mist doesn’t like
her accent either:

Yup, he just … spontaneously kills his mother by accident.
He proceeds to not mourn her at all and just immediately start going through her
shit to throw everything away. Yeah, because accidentally killing your mom is
totally something you can just brush off. I mean, why bother having any tension
or drama to this shit, right? It’s only SOMEONE’S MOTHER DYING. Unfortunately,
though, most of the deaths in this movie are like this – either they’re just
flat out ridiculous, like this, or they had potential to be dramatic and wasted
it.

Remember the Nicolas Cage death scene in the first movie,
how dramatic it was and how everything seemed to stop in place and really focus on the death and what it meant?
Yeah, there was more emotion in that five or ten minute sequence than in this
whole fucking movie.

O Great Nic Cage, we miss you so. Who ever thought a movie would get less classy without Nicolas Cage?

And the acting is just awful. Christopher Mintz-Plasse
delivers probably the worst performance of his life in this. It’s really,
really fuckin’ bad – you have no idea until you actually see this. Remember how
you liked him in the first movie and his character actually seemed relatable as
the pompous rich kid who was lonely with no friends? Well, here he’s about as
likable as a cancerous ball-sack on fire. If I were to compare this character
now with Danny McBride in 30 Minutes or Less … I’d still say McBride is far
worse, but the fact that the comparison could be made speaks volumes.

I mean, take a look at his new name "The Motherfucker." Seriously? Not to mention the costume looks like he wouldn't be out of place hanging out with The Gimp from Pulp Fiction:

Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Chloe Moretz are no better, both of
them constantly looking bored or embarrassed, depending on what’s going on. I
really doubt either one of these two thought this script was any good. Like
really, there’s one scene where Dave is talking to Mindy about their whole
superhero gig and she says “it’s over,” and then Dave’s girlfriend magically
hears that and automatically assumes he was cheating on her.

"I REALLY DON'T WANT TO BE IN THIS MOVIE! GIVE ME LIKE TWO SECONDS OF SCREEN TIME!" Seriously, blink and you'll miss this character ... didn't they spend the whole first movie setting her up with him? I guess that doesn't matter anymore!

Yup, no point in giving him a chance to explain, right? Even
though you’ve apparently been dating for two years now? Nothing? That’s … just
about the laziest excuse for writing off a character I’ve maybe ever seen.

We also get John Leguizamo, playing one of Chris’s
bodyguards. This character is sort of the ‘angel on Chris’s shoulder,’ and
mostly just exists to spout politically correct garbage whenever Chris is
trying to make his supervillain team, constantly complaining that the names he
chooses are racially insensitive. That’s … really about all he does; I’m not
even kidding. And yes, the idea of John Leguizamo as some kind of conscience
for anyone is hilarious to me, too.

"I'm a credible actor, really!"

And then we come to the debacle that is Hit-Girl’s storyline
in this. Apparently Marcus, who now serves as a sort of surrogate father
figure, wants her to quit being a superhero and just be a regular girl. She
wrestles with that, feeling that she should be allowed to do whatever she
wants. Marcus gives her a talking-to and tells her that she “doesn’t know what
she wants” – I’m eerily reminded of exactly how the producers got Moretz to
come back for this role again even though all they had was a script less
dignified than the underside of a kids table at McDonalds.

So she and Dave/Kick Ass team up and make some attempt to
stop drug dealers or something, with their plan being to dress Dave up like a
“pimp.” Though that coat is less pimp than Cruella DeVille.

What was the idea here anyway? Dress him up like a pimp so
he can … go fight a bunch of drug dealers? Why not just have him go in normal
clothes, or even dressed up as Kick Ass? What difference does the disguise make
at all? Either way, he still gets the shit beat out of him just like in the
first one! In fact, it’s almost like
the progress he made in the first one is shot to shit in this! Like many bad
sequels, instead of expanding on the story and showing the progress the
characters have made, this movie just says “fuck it, we’re regressing backwards and just showing you how
annoying and underwhelming we can make their storylines!” Just awful.

Hit-Girl has to pull a Ferris Bueller and run home and
pretend to be sick before Marcus finds out. So she does, although he finds out
two seconds later that she was lying anyway. As punishment, she’s made to go to
some slumber party with a bunch of living Bratz dolls:

Welcome to Mean Girls 5!

And I’m not gonna lie – these scenes are really hard to
watch. Unless you really get off on a bunch of "high school girls" led by an
anorexic Barbie watching a bad One Direction rip-off, this whole thing will
probably make you want to turn the movie off. I’d say the actresses portraying
the other girls are completely shit, but really they’re not – they had
absolutely nothing to work with with the lines they were given. So it was kind
of a doomed prophecy from the beginning, like a train heading for unfinished
tracks, leading right off a cliff.

And it’s just so strange
because it feels NOTHING like a Kick Ass movie during these scenes. I get what
they were going for – a sort of coming-of-age story with Mindy – but it’s
horrifically done, one of the worst attempts at that genre I’ve ever seen. Chloe
Grace-Moretz just seems like she wants to run off set and leave the movie with
every line she delivers. I mean, what was the hook to keep us watching? The
Carrie rip-off scene where they humiliate her in the woods?

Or the payback she gives them? First she starts off very
well, taking the mature route and telling them off like an adult, showing she’s
a better person than them. But then she pulls out some kind of device that
makes people lose control of their bowels, which she uses to make all of them
vomit and shit diarrhea all over the place:

Yeah, you just saw that. Hey kids, next time a bully is mean
to you, just invent an incredibly nuanced and complex device to make them shit
and vomit all over the place in public. Truly that is the only solution to your
problems. Movie, why haven’t you been asphyxiated with a barbed wire rope yet?
Will someone hurry the fuck up and do
that already?

So while that’s going on, Kick-Ass is meeting up with a
bunch of other superheroes, led by Jim Carrey playing Colonel Stars and
Stripes, an ex mafia man who is now a born again Christian. The funny thing is
that he’s really the best thing in this movie and puts in a performance as good
as the ones in the first film. Despite this, he has since denounced the film due
to the violence contained in it in the wake of the Sandy Hook tragedy. As
stupid as it is to pretend a movie like Kick Ass 2 has any bearing on real
life, I’m just amazed that this movie is so pathetic that its only saving grace
is a man who now hates the film. How worthless can you get?

I also love the parts where he tells the characters not to
take the Lord’s name in vain or curse too much. I’m pretty sure that wasn’t in
the script; it was just Carrey’s knee-jerk reaction to the swearing.

So they go around and do some stuff, have a dog bite off a
child sex trafficking guy’s dick (okay), and then Kick Ass has bathroom sex
with another superhero named Night Bitch. The next day he tells Mindy about
Night Bitch and she reacts with disgust – despite the fact that she’s never MET
Night Bitch, she hates her for pretty much no reason. Awesome. And if you think
it’s hard to care about a character named Night Bitch, well, it’s okay – they
don’t really even try to give her a storyline or any personality anyway.

"Hi, I'm Generic Movie Girl #5467. The writers tried to lazily make me more interesting by having me be a superhero, but really I just exist to have big tits and flirt with men. Isn't that wonderful?"

That goes for the rest of these characters, too, as that’s
one of the film’s biggest problems – too many characters! God, I feel like I’m
at an Avengers family reunion with this shit! How are we supposed to be
invested in any of them? It’s just a shame because these are legitimately good
characters, potentially anyway. Maybe if the movie hadn’t spent a third of its
runtime on the awful Hit-Girl storyline, we could have gotten some actual worth
out of these actors and characters. But I guess that would have deprived the
world of cinema of the incredibly
important diarrhea and vomiting scenes:

I’m sorry, I’m still not over that!

But anyway, so yeah, one of the other big themes in this is
the fact that it’s supposedly realistic. The first one was always supposed to
be like that, with the concept of “what would a normal kid becoming a superhero
be like?” It was done fairly well within the confines of the movie’s style.
This one just blows it out of proportion and shoves the theme in your face
every chance it gets, like a child molester that won’t stop flashing your kids
on the way home from school. Jesus Christ this is obnoxious – every other
fucking line is jabbering on about how “this is the REAL WORLD,” and things
don’t happen like in comic books!

Really now? Really, this is what you’re trying to pass off
as a ‘message’ in this movie? Real life, yeah, where people dressed like this
can walk down the street in a populated area and not get the shit beat out of them immediately by every thug in a two-mile radius:

The realism in this is just suffocating. I mean it literally feels like this could happen today, in real life!

But hey, the movie has an explanation for that plot hole: these people are all super-powered and strong as hell. So this is a "reality" where these same people can somehow slaughter a whole
bunch of cops without even getting hurt at all, much less a bullet in the head
like what would happen in real life.

I wouldn't harp so much on this if the movie didn't hammer the line in your face every few scenes. I'm serious; it just gets ridiculous. Every fucking other line is about how "real" this all is! I guess the movie is just trying to convince itself.

Yeah, they’re super-realistic! So gritty and un-Hollywoodized! I especially love
“Mother Russia,” who is probably the most gender-confused movie character of
the year, if not the decade. I mean even transvestites would be like “man,
you’re really hard to figure out!”

Truly up there with Boys Don’t Cry and The Crying Game for heart-warming
stories about a minority group of people.

If you didn’t think there were enough plot lines in this
mess of a movie yet, don’t worry. There’s another one right around the corner.
Dave comes home and finds his dad in his room, scrounging around for drugs and
instead finding the Kick Ass costume. While this had potential to be a key
scene in the film, Kick Ass 2 says fuck that, and makes it a two and a half
minute scene, rushed and underdeveloped, in which Dave suddenly out-of-nowhere
calls his dad a loser and then leaves the house. There was really no build up to this, as Dave’s dad has
been pretty much an ancillary character from the beginning, and the drama will
be totally shot in the next five minutes, so … good job, guys. Good fuckin’
job.

Yeah, and after that we see that the police are arresting
all costumed heroes because of what The Motherfucker and his crew of
leather-clad KISS rejects did in the previous scenes. They even arrest Dave’s
dad, who pretends to be Kick Ass to protect his son. How did that work again?
Did nobody ever take a good look at
Kick Ass? Well, I guess the resemblance is close enough:

Aside from the fact that he's clearly not physically old enough to be Dave's father, did anyone in charge of this arrest ever hear Kick-Ass's voice? Did they think Dave's dad just used a voice box machine to make his voice sound 30 years younger?

Oh, wait, no it isn’t. Did everyone just have a momentary
blindness or something? How could you ever confuse the two?

Then to make things even more contrived, he gets brutally
murdered in the fucking county jail – where were the guards? Did they get paid
off somehow by the same masked freaks they’re supposed to be against? But hey,
it’s supposed to be realistic, so it’s OK now. I love the reaction to the dad’s
death where they actually half-assedly try to inject some real drama. News
flash, dingbats: two-second crying scenes in the middle of a grimy hallway
don’t count as real emotional drama.

Pfft, that's not grief over his dead father. That's his face upon seeing the box office numbers for Kick-Ass 2's opening weekend debut.

At his funeral, we almost get a dramatic moment, which is
quickly shat on when a bunch of goons in gas masks come and wreck the party.

I
love how Dave even makes the point to narrate over the top of this scene that
the cops were guarding the funeral, and then we see the same cops promptly
doing absolutely nothing to stop the gas-mask guys. Like literally you
see them just standing there, doing nothing, in the fucking background!

How is it possible for writing to be so bad? It would be one
thing if the cops were corrupt, or paid off or something. But nope, the movie
never establishes that they are, so the whole thing is just insane. I mean, what is it? Do the gas mask guys just have super-stealthy inaudible footsteps? Do the cops just not see anything until it's directly in their field of vision? Is this just a common occurrence in this city? Do thugs in gas masks carrying assault rifles just come to every funeral as some kind of commemorative ritual? WHAT IS IT?!?

I guess the action scenes are good enough; I mean they’re
over the top and all, but they’re not bad. They’re pretty much the same as the
first movie’s. But is it really worth sitting through the horrible things about
the rest of the film just to see the action? I don’t think so.

The final battle scene is pretty good, but again, is it
worth the rest of the film? No … no it is not.

I'll even ignore the incredibly cliche, sexist crap where the only two chicks have to fight one another; that's how cool this whole thing is.

Well ...

Okay, okay, it's really fucking cool actually. This admittedly really awesome fight scene almost redeems the stupid shit in the rest of the movie. Some of it, anyway.

I do have to bring up one thing though; when Kick-Ass is about to drop The Motherfucker and tries to save him. Kick-Ass, attempting to persuade The Motherfucker to let him rescue him, says it's real life, it's not a comic book, there's no sequel. Really now. There's no sequel. Well, good; I must have just been imagining the whole movie up to now then! And the fact that they're already talking about making a third movie in the series!

But his point is simple: if The Motherfucker falls, he's dead for real; there's no coming back. So I won't harp too much on it, but honestly, even THAT falls flat if you happen to stay after the credits and see that The Motherfucker actually doesn't die at all ...

So really that whole monologue was kinda pointless, huh? I guess they were banking on the fact that everyone would have walked out of the theater a while ago, way before the credits even started rolling.

We then end with a totally bizarre, out of nowhere kiss
scene between Hit Girl and Kick Ass that plays something like a fanfiction
would do … there really isn’t a lot of build up to it, and the two have acted
more like brother and sister than love interests in this whole thing. So mostly
it just comes off as incredibly awkward and illogical, like the rest of this
godforsaken film.

This whole thing is just a mess. Everything about it is just
done so poorly, so sloppily, that it’s hard to get any sincerity out of it. The
acting is half-assed, the writing is just terrible, the characters don’t make
sense … it’s not a good movie. I’ll give the movie that it had some funny
moments, but unlike the first one, I don’t think all of them were intentional, and for the most part they're all way more immature than the first movie's funny moments. This
whole thing can be entertaining, but only in spite of itself. And only if you
don’t think about anything in it. And isn't that the best endorsement for a movie you can get?

Oh well. I can at least give this movie the fact that it did pretty much accomplish what it was going for. As terrible as almost everything about this movie is, I doubt they were really trying to do much else - they pretty much accomplished every goal they had. So if that's what you're looking for in a film, you may not hate it. If anyone tries to tell you otherwise, just hit them with that machine Hit Girl had.

After all, they won't be able to argue if they're too busy vomiting and shitting all over the place!